There’s another crafty holiday on the horizon! With St. Patrick’s Day around the corner, I’m reminded of when my grandma would make corned beef, cabbage, and potatoes for dinner. I went on an epic search and found some great clippings from vintage catalogs, seed advertisements, antique trading cards, and magazines and cleaned them up a bit with Pixlr. Feel free to include them in your St. Patrick’s day blog posts, school projects, art projects, and Etsy gifts, or pair these illustrations with some of my previous posts about food to create a detailed collage. This post also got me thinking about the history of this traditional Irish meal, and I learned some things that I did not expect. Find out below!

Antique Cabbage Catalog

An antique can of corned beef

Antique Potato Advertisement

Antique Potatoes Magazine

Head of Cabbage

Antique Potato Seed Catalog Cover

Vintage Potato Produce Publication

Fun Facts about Corned Beef and Cabbage!

Pork was actually the meat of choice for Irish immigrants first immigrating to America, specifically smoked pork loin. It was cheap to get in Ireland, but not so much in the United States. Therefore, people got creative and started cooking beef. Irish immigrants were inspired to make corned beef after visiting the markets of Jewish Immigrants in New York City. Their corned beef had a similar taste and cured preparation to the popular Irish cut smoked pork back home.

The addition of cabbage was new. Irish families discovered that adding cabbage to a salty corned beef stew made a hearty and delicious meal that was also cost effective.

This meal eventually became a popular meal in American households across the country. In fact, it was even served at President Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration.